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Now if we draw no distinction as to kinds of life, everything
that lives will be capable of happiness, and those will be
effectively happy who possess that one common gift of which every
living thing is by nature receptive. We could not deny it to the
irrational whilst allowing it to the rational. If happiness were
inherent in the bare being-alive, the common ground in which the
cause of happiness could always take root would be simply life.
Those, then, that set happiness not in the mere living but in the
reasoning life seem to overlook the fact that they are not really
making it depend upon life at all: they admit that this reasoning
faculty, round which they centre happiness, is a property [not
the subject of a property]: the subject, to them, must be the
Reasoning-Life since it is in this double term that they find the
basis of the happiness: so that they are making it consist not in
life but in a particular kind of life- not, of course, a species
formally opposite but, in terminology, standing as an "earlier"
to a "later" in the one Kind.
Now in common use this word "Life" embraces many forms which
shade down from primal to secondary and so on, all massed under
the common term- life of plant and life of animal- each phase
brighter or dimmer than its next: and so it evidently must be
with the Good-of-Life. And if thing is ever the image of thing,
so every Good must always be the image of a higher Good.
If mere Being is insufficient, if happiness demands fulness of
life, and exists, therefore, where nothing is lacking of all that
belongs to the idea of life, then happiness can exist only in a
being that lives fully.
And such a one will possess not merely the good, but the Supreme
Good if, that is to say, in the realm of existents the Supreme
Good can be no other than the authentically living, no other than
Life in its greatest plenitude, life in which the good is present
as something essential not as something brought from without, a
life needing no foreign substance called in from a foreign realm,
to establish it in good.
For what could be added to the fullest life to make it the best
life? If anyone should answer, "The nature of Good" [The Good, as
a Divine Hypostasis], the reply would certainly be near our
thought, but we are not seeking the Cause but the main
constituent.
It has been said more than once that the perfect life and the
true life, the essential life, is in the Intellectual Nature
beyond this sphere, and that all other forms of life are
incomplete, are phantoms of life, imperfect, not pure, not more
truly life than they are its contrary: here let it be said
succinctly that since all living things proceed from the one
principle but possess life in different degrees, this principle
must be the first life and the most complete.
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